Last weekend, during the tenth edition of FOSDEM, we had the joy of organizing the first ever Mono developer room. While there had been talks about Mono before (including Miguel’s great presentation at FOSDEM 2007), it was still a rather underrepresented topic. For that reason, Stephane and I requested a developer room and gladly we got it.

While it’s still easy to remove mono from installed systems the most frustration thing from a Debian development perspective is mono build dependencies. There are now patches submitted in lots of packages that each separately build mono cil files for various libraries, etc, and each of these of course require “mono” as a “build” dependency for the package to now build from source. Hence, it is now for example now impossible to “build” an Ubuntu desktop system from ubuntu/debian source packages without also having a working mono, and for every target platform, regardless of how easy it may be to remove from user systems after install. I think this is perhaps part of the reason gNewSense dropped Ubuntu.

The question I have is whether mono is now “required” to “build” Debian the way it now seems required to build Ubuntu. It is not clear to me if these mono build dependencies were introduced upstream in Debian, or downstream in Ubuntu, and I had not had the chance to review their history. From the Debian, and I would presume especially, the gNewSense, perspective, requiring non-free software to build free software is also a bad thing, whether it is actually in the distribution delivered or not. At bare minimum it is a nuisance.

That again is a “runtime” issue. I am talking about “build” issues, in respect to what is required to produce binaries for building a complete distro. The build issue is far worse than the runtime problem, because you cannot remove mono unless you modify every package that now requires it as a build dependency.

Well, the way I look at it, when I require “mono” to be built and running simply to be able to rebuild nautilus from it’s Debian (or Ubuntu) source package, something is fundamentally wrong.

A user can remove Tomboy, of course, and replace it for example with gnote, or even get a pre-built distro that does not have mono apps at all. But I should not have to alter packages just to be able to build free software mono free. This is also a Mono issue I do not yet see being talked about…

No, not any url’s. But if we take debian/control from nautilus from Ubuntu for Lucid, for one example, it’s build-depends includes “liblaunchpad-integration-dev”. This is built from launchpad-integration, who’s build-depends includes:

Hence one cannot build launchpad-integration without mono, and one cannot currently build Nautilus on Ubuntu without launchpad-integration support, at least without altering the package. But there are many other packages which similarly fail to build without Mono or that have what dependent packages which lead to mono build dependencies even though they do not “require” Mono to be installed to run. I have not evaluated Debian vs Ubuntu in this respect however as yet. But it should be looked into by “some” responsible journalist, the implications clearly more deeply considered, and then explained for the community at large, hint hint ;). What does it mean if the free software build process itself is being contaminated?

Explaining a corrupted build process is not an attack on a developer. If Gnome is really impossible to build without mono, it will be dropped the way mono has been or it will be forked. A thing can not be free and encumbered at the same time.

I don’t attack developers (be they Microsoft, Apple, or Mono coders). I think of them like I think of troops deployed in Iraq; they believe they do the right thing but rarely do they ask themselves why they were sent there and what for (“weapons of mass destruction” or something like that). Their impact on society at large is mostly negative because they choose to follow orders from megalomaniacs who abuse power.

Coming from a longtime Internet troll (“clayclamp”), I am not surprised by this slur attempt.

Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations